R help - Dec 2010 - How to apitalize leading letters & else of personal names?

Dear R world,

Do you know about a function that would capitalize in the correct manner
first and family names?
I found in the cwhmisc only the CapLeading function, but it just does not do
the job, taking care only to capitalize the first letter of a word.

I am looking for a function that would recognize " |'|Mc|-" and
capitalize
the first letter following these characters.

An example:
names<-c("jean-francois st-john","helene o'donnel",
"joe mcintyre")

Desired result:
>"Jean-Francois St-John" "Helene O'Donnel" "Joe
McIntyre"
Thanks,

Rock


-- 
View this message in context:
http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/How-to-apitalize-leading-letters-else-of-personal-names-tp3088336p3088336.html
Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

RockO <rock.ouimet <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> 
> Dear R world,
> 
> Do you know about a function that would capitalize in the correct manner
> first and family names?
> I found in the cwhmisc only the CapLeading function, but it just does not
do
> the job, taking care only to capitalize the first letter of a word.
> 
> I am looking for a function that would recognize " |'|Mc|-"
and capitalize
> the first letter following these characters.
> 
> An example:
> names<-c("jean-francois st-john","helene
o'donnel", "joe mcintyre")
> 
> Desired result:
> 
> >"Jean-Francois St-John" "Helene O'Donnel"
"Joe McIntyre"

  This is pretty tricky.  gsub() can do some pretty slick things,
including replace with capitalized versions, so you could probably
write a gsub string to capitalize letters appearing at the beginning
of words OR after non-alphabetic characters.  (See the end of the
examples in ?gsub ...) 

"McIntyre" represents
a whole other class of difficulty.  Some Scots capitalize after "Mc",
others don't.  And what about all the rules about capitalization (or not)
after de/du/van/von?  What would you do with a Dutch name like "'t
Hooft" ... ?

On Dec 14, 2010, at 9:00 PM, RockO wrote:
>
> Dear R world,
>
> Do you know about a function that would capitalize in the correct  
> manner
> first and family names?
> I found in the cwhmisc only the CapLeading function, but it just  
> does not do
> the job, taking care only to capitalize the first letter of a word.
>
> I am looking for a function that would recognize " |'|Mc|-"
and
> capitalize
> the first letter following these characters.
>
> An example:
> names<-c("jean-francois st-john","helene
o'donnel", "joe mcintyre")
>
> Desired result:
>
>> "Jean-Francois St-John" "Helene O'Donnel"
"Joe McIntyre"
Here are four individually crafted gsub functions that could be  
serially applied:

 > gsub("^([a-z])", "\\U\\1", names, perl=TRUE)
[1] "Jean-francois st-john" "Helene o'donnel"      
"Joe mcintyre"

 > gsub(" ([a-z])", " \\U\\1", names, perl=TRUE)
[1] "jean-francois St-john" "helene O'donnel"      
"joe Mcintyre"

 > gsub("\\-([a-z])", "-\\U\\1", names, perl=TRUE)
[1] "jean-Francois st-John" "helene o'donnel"      
"joe mcintyre"

 > gsub("\\'([a-z])", "'\\U\\1", names,
perl=TRUE)
[1] "jean-francois st-john" "helene o'Donnel"      
"joe mcintyre"


 > t2 <- gsub("^([a-z])", "\\U\\1", names, perl=TRUE)
 > t2 <- gsub(" ([a-z])", " \\U\\1", t2, perl=TRUE)
 > t2 <- gsub("\\-([a-z])", "-\\U\\1", t2, perl=TRUE)
 > t2 <-  gsub("\\'([a-z])", "'\\U\\1", t2,
perl=TRUE)
 > t2
[1] "Jean-Francois St-John" "Helene O'Donnel"      
"Joe Mcintyre"

Oooops forgot the mc:
 > gsub("Mc([a-z])", "Mc\\U\\1", t2, perl=TRUE)
[1] "Jean-Francois St-John" "Helene O'Donnel"      
"Joe McIntyre"

-- 
David.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rock
>
>
> -- 
> View this message in context:
http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/How-to-apitalize-leading-letters-else-of-personal-names-tp3088336p3088336.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT

David,

Thank you very much! Indeed Capitalizing names is very tricky, particularly
for people not having English -mother language (as I am). Hopefully, Using
your script will much better than simply having names in uppercase.

Happy Holidays!

Rock
-- 
View this message in context:
http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/How-to-apitalize-leading-letters-else-of-personal-names-tp3088336p3089585.html
Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.